Rabbit Holes
Pick a rabbit hole.
Self-contained explorations, one concept at a time. Interactive where the topic earns it (live mempool, real difficulty countdowns, actual unit converters). Sourced everywhere. Fall down a hole, come out understanding something well.
Live
Bitcoin Units
BTC, sats, mBTC, µBTC, Finney. Which unit to use, when, and why there are so many of them.
✓The Supply Schedule
21 million, forever. Here's how the math works, and why it can't change.
✓Halvings
Every 210,000 blocks, the new-Bitcoin tap halves. Why, when, and what happens after.
✓Mining
Hash, nonce, target. The simplest hard problem in the world, and why it secures $T.
✓Key Space
2^256. A number so large the universe doesn't have enough atoms to brute-force one.
✓UTXOs
Bitcoin does not have balances. It has UTXOs. Once you see them, you can not unsee them.
✓The Mempool
Where transactions wait before they are real. The auction-house buffer between you and a block.
✓Seed Backup Strategies
Twelve words is your wallet. Lose them and you lose your bitcoin. Here is how serious people back them up.
✓The Inflation Bug Postmortem
August 15, 2010: someone created 184 billion BTC out of thin air. Five hours later, it was fixed. Here is the full story.
✓Lightning Routing
The Lightning Network is a graph. Sending a payment is finding a path through it. Here is how routing actually works.
✓Decentralization
What 'decentralized' actually means, where Bitcoin sits on the spectrum, and how the network has defeated takeover attempts without anyone in charge.
✓Quantum and Bitcoin
Quantum is the FUD claim that comes up most often after fiat-debasement and energy. The honest version: the threat is real, the timeline is slow, the fix is governance, and Bitcoin has agency.
✓Bitcoin and Energy
Energy is the FUD claim that comes up most often, full stop. The honest version: the consumption is real, the comparisons are rhetorical, the demand profile is unique, and the fix for what is actually broken is already profitable.
✓Mt. Gox to FTX: The Custody Graveyard
A decade of crypto custodians that lost their customers' coins, from Mt. Gox to FTX, and the honest case for holding your own keys instead.
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